There is something about beautifully made software that has always fascinated me. Sometimes it’s a tiny feature, a clever shortcut, or the way something works so smoothly that you don’t even notice it. You wish you could have that one little thing in your own project. You can see what it does, but you have no idea how it actually works.
I’ve been following something quite extraordinary happening in the AI world this October. And I think it could change the way we build things with AI.
The interesting part is that you don’t need to become an expert programmer or spend months figuring things out. We are getting surprisingly close to a point where you can show AI something that already works and ask it to figure out the rest.
Start with something you already wish you could build
Let’s make this practical.
Imagine you love a particular feature in a video editor. Perhaps it’s the way the timeline snaps clips into place, or how a certain transition behaves.
You could spend hours describing the effect to Claude and asking it to recreate it.
Or you could investigate the feature first.
You want to discover what happens when you use it, what controls the result, and which parts you could reproduce in your own software.
Here’s another example I find interesting: older applications sometimes open unusual file formats that newer tools no longer support.
If you’re trying to make an AI tool that can read those files, understanding how the older application interprets them can be more helpful than asking AI to guess the format.
There are also smaller opportunities: a drawing tool’s alignment behavior, a music application’s playback controls, or the way a note-taking app preserves formatting when you move content somewhere else.
You don’t necessarily need the whole application. You need to understand the part that matters.
This is where reverse engineering becomes useful.
In plain English, reverse engineering means looking at something that already works and figuring out how it was made to work.
AI makes that investigation much easier. You still have to check what it discovers, and you should only examine software you’re authorized to study.
Let’s set it up.
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